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Postformal in Psychology: Beyond Piaget’s Formal Operations

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Postformal Education

Part of the book series: Critical Studies of Education ((CSOE,volume 3))

Abstract

I expect that this chapter will be the most challenging for readers with limited prior knowledge of adult developmental psychology. It has certainly been the most challenging to write—largely because there is so much material on higher stages of reasoning, yet so little coherence of it to date. In this chapter we explore a range of adult development theories created by psychologists who saw beyond the limits of Piaget’s cognitive model. I introduce the main researchers who have identified and described postformal reasoning qualities and reiterate the shift from formal to postformal reasoning. The postformal reasoning features they identify are listed, and from these I theorise and discuss twelve distinct postformal reasoning qualities. By the end you will have a coherent picture of how postformal reasoning is conceptually aligned with four themes distilled from the evolution of consciousness research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Postmodernism includes complex attempts to find conceptual bridges between what has been called the “cosmological and poststructuralist postmodernisms” (Gare 2002; Keller and Daniell 2002).

  2. 2.

    The series began as a Symposium on “Post-Formal Operations.” The Second Harvard University Symposium on Beyond Formal Operations: The Development of Adolescent and Adult Thought and Perception, was held in 1985. The Third Harvard University Symposium on Beyond Formal Operations: Positive Development during Adolescence and Adulthood was held in 1987.

  3. 3.

    I coin the term delicate theorising in reference to Goethe’s delicate empiricism (Holdrege 2005; Robbins 2006).

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    Jennifer M. Gidley PhD

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Gidley, J.M. (2016). Postformal in Psychology: Beyond Piaget’s Formal Operations. In: Postformal Education. Critical Studies of Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29069-0_5

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